Eight hundred years ago, teenager Laurentius Loricatus accidentally killed a man in Italy. He then headed to a cave where he lived for 34 years, whipping himself to atone for his sins. Today, his story lives in the Vatican Secret Archives, on a piece of parchment covered in purple spots.

If you build a new Metro line in Rome, you have to worry about more than just engineering. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction team working on the Metro C, which will run through the center of the city, has now unearthed a huge suite of ancient barracks.

A cache of over 4,000 silver and bronze coins dating back to ancient Rome has been discovered by a Swiss farmer. Buried some 1,700 years ago, it’s one of the largest treasures of its kind ever found in Switzerland.

For centuries, humans have placed way too much importance on people playing fictional characters on stage. And when you’ve done that for as long as we have, things are bound to get weird occasionally. Here are five of the strangest stories from the history of theater.

Legionary. Century. Centurions. Cohorts. Legions. These are all terms for a certain group or type of Roman soldier. This rather interesting break down of the Roman Army shows how the army was organized, how Roman citizens were Legionaries and non-Roman citizens were Auxiliaries and how those soldiers were grouped…

Ennion made me. Those were the words molded on glass vases and jars that survived centuries of dust, change, and trauma all over the classical world. But who was Ennion? And how, in the early years of the world, did his glassware become so famous?

Lucky Peach shows us a behind the counter look at what is probably the best pizza place in Rome (and maybe Italy? the world?): Pizzarium. Consistently placed on top ten lists, it's famous for its pizza al taglio, which is pizza by the slice. Chef Gabriele Bonci gives us a rundown on how he makes pizza and it's pretty…

February gets the shaft when it comes to days in the month. While other months last 30 or 31 days, February has 28 or 29, depending on the year. Why? Well, this video explains all of the fiddling that Romans did to the calendar, and how that resulted in a single short month.

We know that the ancient Greeks had a massively entertaining sets of gods and goddesses. So it's no wonder that when Rome conquered Greece, they replaced their own dull pantheon with renamed versions of Zeus, Athena, and the others. But not all Roman gods were Greek copies — here are a few of the more important ones.

If you've ever wondered why the ancient structures of Rome have endured for millennia, when our own modern concrete is susceptible to cracks and crumbles, well, now you have your answer. Researchers recreated the Roman recipe and discovered that the formation of a certain kind of crystal in the concrete is the reason…

Flooding in Pakistan has stranded hundreds of thousands of people, an anti-vaccination movement trending in L.A.'s most affluent neighborhoods is causing a whooping cough epidemic, and one broken air conditioner could destroy Rome's most priceless art. Hope you're comfortable, this week's What's Ruining Our Cities is…

Rome was the first city on the planet to have an extensive and efficient municipal water system, thanks to the empire's ambitious aqueduct system that's still found throughout Europe. But that infrastructure was also pumping ancient Romans with lead—up to 100 times the amount of lead found in local spring water.

Archaeologists from the University of Michigan believe they have found what is perhaps the oldest Roman temple still in existence. Built around the 7th century BC—probably for the goddess Fortuna—the temple tells us a lot about how the Romans built their city, thousands of years ago.